Abstract
ABSTRACT This article applies a cognitive narratological approach to Janet Murray’s conception of the “multiform” digital text that allows a user to experience multiple versions or alternative outcomes of a story. I argue from a psychologically-grounded position that branching narratives are fundamentally dissatisfying due to completionism, the onus of choice and diffusion of inherent stakes. With reference to two of my own texts, AMNESIAC (2021) and Mutiny on the Batavia (2022), I describe a version of the multiform story that makes use of a labile digital text-space while preserving the teleology of a linear narrative, and which speaks to the essential human experience of a unique, individual existence over time. Digital texts, I also argue, can dramatise both the arbitrary and contingent mental constructions of reality and the determinist nature of media forms. An increasingly immersive mediated existence means that experimental narratives in particular must fulfil our prior expectations of meaningful stories while also using the allowances of unbound narrative to keep written stories innovative, interesting and to expose their essentially constructed nature.
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